In software development, multiple computing environments are generally created for testing, deployment, integration, diagnostics, and maintenance services that imitate a main production environment. However, recreating a production environment during application life cycle management can be labor intensive and difficult to maintain. Conventionally, recreated environments lack direct unfettered access to data of the production environment due to issues related to overhead, stability, security, data protection, and/or data privacy. For example, staging environments are traditionally employed to distribute changes made in the production environment. However, staging environments cause stale data that restrict a developer's ability to rollback changes, recreate bugs, and provide just-in-time fixes.
Increasingly, computing environments are hosted using distributed computing in a data center or integrated with cloud computing on an array of different computing devices. Distributed computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet), often referred to as “cloud computing.” Cloud computing can generally include an interface that a user can use to manage associated resources such as processors, storage, network services, etc. For example, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings facilitate deployment of applications on different computing devices or platforms using templates. Traditionally, templates lack specific changes made in the production environment during application development. Commonly, applications and application data are managed by separate information silos. Because of the increasing dependencies on accurate data, application downtime and data-inaccessibility of any kind can be costly. Accordingly, traditional data management systems lack end-to-end application environment management that include application awareness to recreate computing environments without stopping and restarting an entire software application.